Who was Lee Miller? The model-turned-war correspondent who photographed WW2 horrors

Now, Miller’s wartime work and staggering photographic archive is the subject of the biopic Lee, starring Kate Winslet in the titular role. We caught up with Ellen Kuras, making her feature directorial debut, to learn more about the real Lee Miller and the challenges of portraying her life on film.

Who was Lee Miller?

Born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller received an early education in photography from her father, Theodore, who. He taught her the rudiments and used her as a model for his work.

In her teens, she developed an interest in theatre – studying lighting, costume and set design in Paris, then joined an experimental theatre group in Vassar College, New York – before she was spotted on the streets of Manhattan as a prospective model.

Miller’s big break was due to a near-death experience, when the famed publisher Condé Nast stopped her from being hit by a car. He offered her a job and soon the 19-year-old beauty was on the cover of American and British Vogue.

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By 1929, Miller had moved back to Paris, where she became the muse, collaborator and lover of the American surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Her modelling soon gave way to a burgeoning talent behind the camera, and it was in these years that she experimented and cultivated the techniques that would define her later work.

Surrealism played a key role in her photography, even as she transitioned from fashion photography to war reporting. Lee director Ellen Kuras emphasises the importance of Miller's artistic background in shaping her views of the world.

Miller “understood metaphor and the irony of what she was seeing,” explains Kuras. “Not only the literal of what was happening, but also the figurative, and what the meaning was.”

Lee Miller in WW2

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Miller was living in London. The last few years had been spent moving around (between Paris, New York and Cairo, where she lived with her first husband). By 1939, she was in a passionate relationship with the British surrealist artist Roland Penrose and was launching her career as a photojournalist.

In London, she documented the Blitz for British Vogue. This marked a dramatic shift from her previous work but, as Kuras notes, Miller "wanted to show people what was really happening". A determination to photograph the truth became her driving force.

“She was, by that time, a middle-aged woman picking up a camera, donning her fatigues and just charging out into the middle of war to go and take photographs,” says Kuras. “She was a very unusual kind of person who wouldn't let the conventions of the day keep her back. She was always trying to find a way to get to where she wanted to go.”

A month and a half after D-Day, Miller was in war-torn France following the 83rd Infantry Division of the US Army.

Documenting women’s wartime lives

Miller's approach to war photography was unconventional, as Kuras points out: "She was not taking a classical view of combat photography."

While other correspondents focused on battles and military operations, Miller was interested in the human stories. She wanted to document the experiences of civilians, particularly women, whose lives were upended by the conflict.

“She chose to see the war through a different lens,” says Kuras. In Lee, there is a scene when Miller photographs French women accused of collaborating with the Nazis; in many cases, such women were rounded up, often with no legal process, and had their heads shaved in a punishment intended to humiliate and shame.

The real Miller wrote in 1944: “In Rennes today I went to a chastisement of French collaborators – the girls had had their hair shaved although the interrogation had merely confirmed that there was evidence enough for their trial later on. They were stupid little girls – not intelligent enough to feel ashamed.”

As Miller raced ahead to get a picture of the suspected collaborators as they were paraded down the street, her uniform led some in the crowd to think that she herself had apprehended the women. “I was kissed and congratulated,” she wrote, “while the victims were spat on and slapped.”

Photographing the Holocaust

As the Allies advanced across Europe, Miller moved closer to the frontlines. Through her camera, she saw the liberation of Paris and the horrors of the concentration camps in Germany. Her work from this period is among her most famous, providing stark and unflinching evidence of the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Miller’s experience at Dachau in April 1945 had a particularly profound impact on her. The images she captured there revealed the extent of the suffering and devastation inside the camp. She sent them to British Vogue for publication, vehement that this evil be seen by the world.

Yet arguably the most iconic moment in Miller's career came a short time after her experiences at the death camp: when she entered the Munich apartment belonging to Adolf Hitler and famously took a bath in his tub.

The photograph – taken by her friend and war correspondent for Life, David E Scherman – shows Miller seated in the bathtub, her face expressionless and hair damp, as if fresh from washing. Her boots, covered in the mud from Dachau, are on the Führer’s bathmat. Behind her rests a portrait of Hitler.

The image, which was taken on the same day that Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, has since become one of the defining images of the war, and a symbol of the fall of the Nazi regime.

Miller "was very aware of what she was doing" when she staged the photograph, says Kuras, in creating a powerful juxtaposition between the ordinary domestic setting and the unimaginable horrors she had just witnessed. The dirt-stained bathmat contrasts with the sterile luxury of the room.

For Miller, it was not just a personal display of defiance against the fallen Hitler, but a deliberate act. "She wanted to make a story of this moment,” says Kuras.

What happened to Lee Miller after the war?

Despite her successes as a war correspondent, Miller struggled in the following years. The emotional toll of what she witnessed, combined with the frustration of seeing some of her most important photographs go unpublished, caused a deep disillusionment.

British Vogue refused to run some of Miller's photographs, especially those taken in the concentration camps. The magazine, under the editorship of Audrey Withers, had supported Miller's wartime work, but these graphic photographs were deemed too shocking for the readers – of a fashion magazine, no less, which typically went for a more aspirational tone.

The tension between Miller’s hopes for her work and the choices of the publications she works for, are central to the movie Lee.

Kuras believes the censorship of Miller’s work – which she describes as a “a knife in her side” – contributed to her mental health struggles; today, she would be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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While British Vogue remained reluctant, American Vogue would publish Miller’s images, running them alongside her firsthand accounts and providing an unflinching portrayal of the horrors she witnessed. The headline was “Believe it”.

In 1947, Miller married Roland Penrose, gave birth to a son named Antony, and settled at Farley Farm House in Sussex. This became something of a gathering place for artists and intellectuals, such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and Miller took up cooking in order to treat her esteemed guests to lavish dinner parties.

Yet despite her continued involvement in the art world, Miller's postwar years were marked by depression and an eventual retreat from public life. She struggled with alcoholism and lingering trauma, before dying in 1977 of cancer. She was 70.

The legacy of Lee Miller’s photography

Miller’s work could easily have been forgotten and lost, were it not for her son. While sorting through his mother’s belongings following her death, Antony Penrose uncovered tens of thousands of photographs and negatives, as well as writings that revealed the extent of her contributions as a war correspondent.

Until then, Penrose had next to no knowledge of his mother's career as she had put her photography aside after the war and rarely spoke of her experiences. His discovery, however, ensured that Miller’s career would be preserved, culminating in books and exhibitions of her work and the founding of the Lee Miller Archives.

Penrose himself has published several books about his mother, including Lee Miller’s War, which offers a comprehensive look at her wartime photography and writings. Kuras’s movie Lee is the latest effort to bring Miller’s extraordinary story to a new generation.

Her images from the Second World War remain powerful visual records of a conflict that reshaped the world in the 20th century. Miller "was a very progressive, contemporary woman", observes Kuras, “whose determination to document the truth, regardless of personal cost, set her apart from her contemporaries. She brought forth the contemporary times by taking us through the past.”